A year after near-death: I want to name my Tao.

My daily Buddhist reflection book hasn't moved a page since April 12th. 

See demons as demons: that is the danger.
Know that they are powerless: that is the way.
Understand them for what they are: that is deliverance.
Recognize them as your father and mother: that is their end.
Realize they are creations of the mind: they become its glory.
When these truths are known, all is liberation. -Milarepa

I stare at it and think it is speaking to me, and refuse to consider the possibility that perhaps, actually, it is. That is just ridiculous. I don't believe things happen for a reason anymore. (Or do I?) I haven't seen my brother in a while. But when I do, I wonder why he visits me at all. Death, it seems, has not improved our ability to communicate.

I didn't call my parents on that day. I know that's kind of terrible. But I can still remember holding him right after he was born. For my mother, it's left in the stretch marks on her stomach; we're all imprinted on her body for the rest of her life. Whatever happens to us.

I called the next day instead.

I'm sure she waited all day with her phone by her. 

I'm sure she understood.

Or at least, she would tell me she did.

Then the danger of paging ahead to my own birthday, my 30th, which announces:

May I be born into a family neither rich nor poor
But into a modest home
So that I may easily renounce the place of my birth. -Shabkar

I laughed out loud at my patent inability to renounce anything of the kind. When that date comes, I will almost certainly be moved back into my childhood home, this book packed away.

Perhaps, I tell myself, I should only tackle one Buddhist verse at a time.

It has been almost exactly one year.

It has been one year since anything terrible happened.

Allow me my anniversaries.

Perhaps to you it seems morbid to live in a world where the terrible things are how I have marked time passing. But for a while there, I never even took my helmet off, nevermind my parachute. I thought if I could make it to a year, that I would have somehow emerged victorious in a symbolic battle with whatever it was that was relentlessly taking me down.

Of course there wasn't any clear assailant. Just. Life. Happening.

This is why I started with Hemingway and graduated to stories of Vietnam. I needed something I could relate to.

While inching toward this landmark time, my life has slowly been becoming a life again at a pace that would make the pitch-drop experiment seem recklessly fast. It's stunning to me how long all of this has taken, especially since I feel like we live in a society where "get back on the horse again" is our mantra. Don't let anyone see you down. Dust off. Get back up. Go.

Perhaps I have been dusting off. One particle at a time.

Last weekend I hosted a party at my home. It was a small party. But still, I let people in my nest again. Sure, they could walk through my yard and house without having to squeeze past scores of sweaty strangers, and we didn't even run out of alcohol, and it all took place in daylight... No one will tell stories about this party in years to come. It was the most forgettable of fêtes. But, there was a cooler. And a grill. And a respectable circle of garden companions.

I have stopped asking for things to be like before.

I have started asking for them to be new again. 

"So, you're basically Buddhist?" someone asked me on Saturday night.
"I wish I could just be that. Then I could explain everything in a tidy set of beliefs."
"What doesn't fit?"
"I see patterns in things. Big patterns. Things speak to each other. There are lessons happening. There is no space for that in Buddhism. It is a religion of seeing meaninglessness, embracing it, and choosing to appreciate impermanence. It is not a religion of the universe sending you messages, or "things happening for a reason," or divine intervention." But sometimes those things happen too.

The only religious guidance I feel like I can hold on to now is this "The Tao that can be named, is not the Tao."

In other words, if I thought I had it all figured out, that would be the first sign of my wrongness. Wanting the universe we live in to be entirely explained by Buddhism or anything else is just another way of grasping for some control. Some answers. Some explanations. Some certainty.

Then I could make sense of all of my losses under the rubric of impermanence. We all get sick, we all lose things, we all die. Ok. That's what happened. And it's about learning to let go when things flow away.

I believe that is part of it.

But I don't believe that is all of it.

Because, sometimes some things feel true to me, and others do not. Sometimes I know things are right, and sometimes I know they are not. 

That knowing about the rightness of things is a kind of truth.

It is about there being some kind of larger truth to tap into. It is about there being something bigger that makes sense.

That could be Christianity, a cult, or a generic kind of faith of any kind. But I don't find it described anywhere except in the stories of mystics. It comes when I feel grounded in myself and the world around me. 

But such a new-age answer! Unverifiable truths, seen through their private lenses, unchecked by any scientific process or religious doctrine.

I see why it appears problematic.

Impermanence and yet, some kind of enduring wisdom. Some kind of underlying, profound truth.

I struggle with how problematic it is. I want to name my Tao. 

I have had an entire year to heal now, alongside my companion. And this is what I have arrived at. Much of life is about impermanence. And yet, it does not lack meaning. But needing meaning impedes our ability to experience deeper meanings.

"Why don't you just become a monk?" the same person asked.
"That would be easier, wouldn't it? I retain this sense that I'm supposed to be out in the world. And so, for now, I am."

And it all ebbs and flows.

Before all of these things happened, I thought I knew myself. I could pick out the adjectives. Smart, strong, persistent, etc. So many things. The kinds of things I told myself, and other people told me too. There was evidence. My Ph.D. My GPA. My exceptional softball batting average.

Over the last eighteen months, I have seen that I do not know myself at all. The things I thought were fixed, it turned out were deeply dependent on my context and past experiences. And new contexts and experiences profoundly changed how I was in the world. I don't mean I got a new hair cut. I mean, I couldn't recognize myself.

The terror of looking in a mirror and seeing a stranger in my eyes is like nothing I had ever experienced before. To watch that stranger morph into something that I slowly became resonant with again was an agonizing process of not-self discovery.

There were things I had counted on. Like knowing my biography. Knowing who I was. Being able to describe myself. I had a narrative. And it had different versions, sure, but it existed.

None of my old adjectives encompassed new facets that emerged "Afraid to go to the grocery store." "Terrified to be alone in a room with a man." "Waking up throughout the night to see if my dog has stopped breathing." "Waking up in a panic every night, because surely someone else has died too." "Unable to read." "Unable to write." "Unable to go to work." "Unable."

To throw a garden party again, however humble, is like drinking water after a marathon. But not a marathon. That's a terrible comparison. A marathon only lasts a few hours. This was more than a year. More than a year. And then some. Who can run for that long?


I haven't cried since the day of Bandit's accident. Sometimes I try to pinch around my eyes to make it happen. I try to think my saddest thoughts.

Something holds it at bay.

It is just one more thing about myself I cannot fully recognize, but am forced to accept. Because apparently, for now, that is how it is. The definition of a personality eludes me along with everything else. What a joke for a woman who does personality research!

It is the same as when I look at Bandit's still-not-entirely-healed leg, and the bulk diapers that take up all of my free storage space: well? He will definitely heal at least as much as he has so far. I can say that much.

It is one thing for the world to not make sense. It is one thing to shake a fist at God and say "why?" It is another to look in my own eyes and be unsure of what is looking back. What holds this "who" together. Where the glue of my insides is. Who I would be if there was nothing. Who I would be if there was everything.

Perhaps the aging process naturally reveals this lack of selfhood. We're supposed to see wrinkles but still feel twenty, and realize we are not our bodies. We're supposed to have children, and see ourselves in them, and see how interconnected with other bodies we are. We're supposed to have mastectomies and gall bladder surgery and go bald and still, fundamentally, feel like we know our core self, and to ask what makes up that core, after all.

I would never fool myself into thinking there isn't more to lose. I know I am not one hundred years old. I don't even feel old. I feel more like a child again than ever. I feel like each day of these past couple of months has been like a second adolescence. This time, instead of learning how to apply mascara and not have my period bleed through my jeans, I am learning to not need the glue that held me together before. I am learning my Tao from the inside out. Despite a seemingly complete inability to understand the language. The world doesn't make sense to me, and I don't make sense to myself.

I still keep an eye out for someone who can explain it all to me.

But I suspect anytime I met someone who could, that they wouldn't.

Because that damn Tao that can be named, is not the Tao anyway.

For now, that is my glue. That and the sticky tabs on Bandit's diapers.

Happy Anniversary. 

Namaste.